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Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Ecasound, Multitrack audio processing tool.

Ecasound is a software package designed for multitrack audio processing.
It can be used for simple tasks like audio playback, recording and
format conversions, as well as for multitrack effect processing, mixing,
recording and signal recycling. Ecasound supports a wide range of audio
inputs, outputs and effect algorithms. Effects and audio objects can be
combined in various ways, and their parameters can be controlled by
operator objects like oscillators and MIDI-CCs. A versatile console mode
user-interface is included in the package.

In Linux Mint 13 (MATE edition), when you insert a USB drive into your
machine, a popup window will appear to show the files and folders you
store within the USB. I dont like this feature, when I insert a USB into
my machine, I just need it to be mounted and dont want to be distracted
by any popup window.

To disable that popup window feature in Linux Mint 13 (MATE), you just
need to open Caja file manager and go to the Preferences window:

After the Preferences window appear, go to the media tab and check the
"Never prompt or start programs on media insertion" option:

From now, no annoying popup window will appear when you insert a USB
drive into your machine. This trick also works in Ubuntu, Linux Mint
Cinnamon and other distros that use Nautilus file manager.

The US District Court of New Jersey has ruled that Tetris-like game Mino infringes Tetris Holding’s copyright, Sunstein Law reports (via Marsh Davies).
It’s a decision that’ll have a big knock-on effect for all games that
are functionally similar or identical to already successful games.
Previously, developers have struggled to prove that the mechanics of a
game can be protected under copyright, since ‘ideas’ themselves cannot.
That’s led to an incredibly clone-happy culture, in which virtually
every successful game has any number of rip-offs on Flash portals or the
iOS App Store.
But this case delved deep into the mechanics of Tetris to sort out
what qualified as the ‘idea’ of the game, and what elements were
specific to Tetris’ particular ‘expression’ of it. Copying the idea is
fine – copying the expression is not.
Mino creators Xio didn’t try to argue that the similar elements of
their game weren’t copied from Tetris. Instead, they claimed that the
specifics of Tetris are essential and generic to the idea behind it, and
therefore fair game.
The court’s decision, quite reasonably, was that it would be
perfectly possible to make a game about falling blocks fitting together
and vanishing without copying the specific shapes of those blocks, the
dimensions of the game space, the brightly coloured look, and many other
specifics of Tetris that Mino shares.
You can see what Xio might have been thinking: change any or all of
those things, and you’d probably end up with a worst game. But that’s
not Tetris Holdings’ problem: if you choose to copy their idea, you have
to come up with an expression of it that’s different to theirs. If you
can’t think of a better one, tough.
The result will give hope to developers like Spry Fox, who are taking legal action
against the creators of Yeti Town, which they say copies their Facebook
game Triple Town. There’s no denying the ideas are basically the same,
but Spy Fox point out that Yeti Town also copies particulars like the
specific prices of items in the in-game shop. Previously, Yeti Town
developer 6Waves might have been able to argue that these specifics were
part of the ‘idea’ of the game and not the ‘expression’ of it. The
Tetris decision is going to make that much harder.
From everything I’ve read about the case, it seems like the right
call, and a positive thing for developers suffering actual damage from
clones. But the specifics are really important. It would be a disaster
if all game mechanics were declared part of the ‘expression’ of an idea,
because games would no longer be allowed to learn from each other. Game
design is as much science as art, and all of my favourite games copy
good mechanics from the classics that inspired them.
If every legal case goes into the kind of analytical depth that this one did, hopefully that distinction will remain clear. Sunstein’s write-up is great, by the way, and explains what little legalese is relevant.

IBM may not make PCs any more, but it looks like that’s our loss and not theirs. Supercomputer rankings site TOP500
has just awarded a system based on its Sequoia design the official
title of world’s fastest computer. The theoretical peak performance of
the new number one is almost twice as quick as the previous incumbent of
the role, Fujitsu’s K Computer.
With almost one hundred thousand individual IBM Power BQC processors
and over million and a half cores, the new champ is housed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
in the US where it has a slightly sinister task: it’s used by the
National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) for modelling the
performance of nuclear weapons. In other words, it may be technically
faster, since the K Computer is mostly used for things like modelling
climate change and designing solar cells, on a scale of moral
equivalence it’s still our favourite.
Liberal qualms aside, Sequoia is incredible though. It consumes 7.89MW
of power, and has one and a half petabytes of memory. Theoretical peak
performance is 20 petaflops, and it’s been benchmarked running at
16.32petaflops. By comparison, K Computer is theoretically capable of
running at 11petaflops, and its number one position was held with a
benchmark of 10 petaflops.
Here’s some perspective – just 18 months ago, the fastest computer in
the TOP500 list was performing at 2.57 petaflops. For anyone who’s
still unsure about the technical feasibility of something like Google
Glasses, from a server side augmented reality point of view, that’s an
increase of six and a half times in performance in less than two years.
Of course, you need the budget of a nuclear defence program (around
$70bn a year) to develop fast computers that quickly. There aren’t many
computer companies that sit on that kind of cash.

In times of war and chaos you will assume the role of a young man, who is
supposed to liberate the entire world of Eo from the new, nameless evil.
Along with a group of diverse heroes and a dragon as trustful companions,
you will fight to gain information about this mysterious new enemy and
thereby discover your own true destiny. With daring and courage you will
be able to succeed in this brand new, epic, strategic RTS/PRG-Mix that
combines the storylines of the previous Spellforce-games and continues
further.

The developers at the Nouveau project have published version 1.0.0
of their open source graphics driver for X.org's X Server. About seven
years into the project, this milestone means that the final part of the
Nouveau driver has now left behind its pre-release status – the Nouveau
3D drivers have been part of Mesa 3D for some time, and the Nouveau DRM
driver, which is being developed as part of the Linux kernel, left the staging area with Linux 3.4 in mid-May. At the time of writing, an official release email has yet to be issued.

The Nouveau driver, which has been a standard component of Linux
distributions for quite some time now, supports dual monitor operation
and 2D acceleration via EXA, and offers all the components that are
required to use 3D acceleration with nearly all NVIDIA graphics chips.
However, as recently demonstrated by Phoronix in a series of benchmarks,
the proprietary NVIDIA driver gets far better 3D performance from the
graphics cores. For simple games and the desktop effects of GNOME and
KDE, however, the Nouveau driver's 3D performance is sufficient. The
driver doesn't activate a number of power management features, and it
can't access the fan control on many graphics cards. If a graphics card
doesn't control the fan on its own, the fan will run at full speed when
the Nouveau driver is used, which causes excess noise and can wear out
bearings.
NVIDIA has been a member of the Linux Foundation since March
but doesn't contribute to the development of Nouveau – lately, the
company has mainly focused its Linux efforts on its ARM chips. NVIDIA
doesn't even provide programming information; the Nouveau developers
have to reverse engineer it all. This is one of several areas where
NVIDIA stands out because of its poor support of the open source
developers, and it is likely one of the reasons why Linux creator Linus
Torvalds recently held his middle finger up to a camera and said: "NVIDIA, fuck you".

Superb Mini Server (SMS) 1.6.6, a new version of the project's Slackware-based distribution for servers, has been released: "Superb
Mini Server version 1.6.6 released (Linux kernel 3.2.20). It's that
time again, we have a new kernel, a lot of upgrades, security fixes and
some new features. For our default web server we keep Apache HTTPD
2.2.22 and PHP 5.3.14, once again, to maintain stability and
compatibility. New PHP 5.4.4 and HTTPD 2.4.2 packages are available
though, under testing in Extra if someone wants to use them. MySQL has
been upgraded to the 5.5.x branch so it needs your attention. If you are
upgrading, be sure to backup your /var/lib/mysql folder containing your
MySQL databases and restore it after and run mysql_upgrade. Perl has
also been upgraded to 5.16, so if you have Perl modules installed by
yourself, I would recommend that you remove them and install them again." See the release announcement for more warnings and recommendations. Download: SMS.Native.CD-1.6.6-Install.iso (711MB, MD5), SMS64.Native.CD-1.6.6-Install.iso (698MB, MD5).

ZevenOS-Neptune, a Linux operating system
with software optimized for slower computers and with elements of BeOS,
has just reached version 2.5.1.

ZevenOS-Neptune 2.5.1 is a service release update, at least according to the developers, with just a few fixes and changes.

Highlights of ZevenOS-Neptune 2.5.1:

· CUPS printer detection has been fixed; · Amarok crashing on start has been repaired; · Additional language support and localization has been fixed; · Printer applet crashing fixed; · sudos /var/lib/sudo permission have been repaired; · Additional languages to isolinux bootloader menu have been added; · English is the first and default boot entry in isolinux menu; · Linux kernel has been updated to 3.3.8; · KDE SC has been updated to 4.8.4.